Former President Obama and his CIA Director John Brennan ignored a European CIA agent’s pleas for help and left her to rot in an Italian prison. Lucky for her, Donald Trump was elected President. After the election, her situation was aided and abetted by the Trump Administration for which she is grateful.
A few days before the President Trump inauguration, in January, 2017, Tucker Carlson at FOX News did a piece on CIA case officer Ms. Sabrina De Sousa.
Sabrina De Sousa, a former CIA case officer, was detained Monday in Portugal and is awaiting extradition to Italy and four years in prison for the 2003 abduction of a suspected terrorist living in Milan.
The operation was part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program — and one De Sousa says she was not involved in.
FOX News wrote –
If extradited as planned, De Sousa, who no longer works for the agency, will be the first CIA officer and U.S. diplomat imprisoned over the controversial rendition program.
De Sousa, 61, was working in Milan as an undercover CIA officer in 2003 when U.S. and Italian intelligence agents abducted radical Egyptian cleric Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, and transported him to his native Egypt for interrogation.
Phone records obtained by Italian prosecutors corroborated De Sousa’s claim that she was some 130 miles away in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, chaperoning her son’s school ski trip, on the day Omar was abducted. Still, Italy brought “broad charges” against her for a plot she says she had no direct part in.
The abduction was part of the controversial program, implemented under President George W. Bush, and entailed taking terror suspects to countries where torture is allowed. Omar — who turned out to be a “nobody,” according to De Sousa — was held at an American military base in Germany before being flown to Cairo, Egypt, where he says he was tortured.
He was soon released from prison for lack of prosecutable evidence against him.
In 2009, De Sousa, along with 25 other Americans, was convicted in absentia on kidnapping and other charges related to the abduction. Several were since pardoned and not one has done time in prison. The Italians also convicted Omar in absentia of “criminal association for the purposes of international terrorism” and sentenced him to six years in prison.
De Sousa described herself as a “scapegoat” for a program authorized by officials at the highest levels of U.S. government.
The former agent, who spent the night in a women’s prison near Lisbon after a Portuguese court ordered police to extradite her, said she had hoped President Trump would intervene on her behalf.
De Sousa believes that one of the reasons Obama’s CIA didn’t intervene in her case was due to self preservation. They must have thought that “sacrificing the rank and file would divert attention from the leadership.”
In efforts to exonerate herself, De Sousa wrote numerous individuals in Washington over the years including letters from Human Rights First on her behalf –
De Sousa wrote the US State Department and even President Bush’s AG –
One of De Sousa’s concerns with her trial was that the judge in the case swapped information involved in the case (from page 12 of the Italian Court’s judgement) –
De Sousa shared with us that –
All the Italian government officials on trial said they could not speak because they were not allowed to do so as the government had imposed state secrets.
They were all granted immunity because…get this…their relationship with foreign Intel services was a state secret.
All the Americans were convicted.
Fortunately for De Sousa, in spite of the Deep State’s illegal actions and the MSM’s constant defamation of the Republican candidate in the 2016 election, Donald Trump won the election.
De Sousa shared the following with us personally –
I personally benefited from the Trump effect. I was in Portugal when President Trump won but was not yet in office. Looming in my future was an extradition from Portugal, to a prison in Italy scenario. Obama’s State Department consular section at the Lisbon Embassy contacted me once, only after a news article saying they had never bothered to do so.
But this all changed during the transition when the Embassy consular officer called several times. When the Portuguese court refused to turn over my passport, the Embassy cancelled it and reissued me a ten year passport instead of the one trip travel document. The Consular officer and lawyer traveled to Porto prison twice to meet me and pass messages back to Washington. I was released at the 11th hour. No extradition – no prison in Italy.
Currently De Sousa is serving a three year sentence via probation with numerous conditions, including police checks between 11pm and 6am. She has to incur five hour travel to do community service at a house for minors run by a police officer outside Rome where she now lives. It’s an unusually long distance for such an ordeal but De Sousa does it.
Many individuals around the globe are grateful for the Trump win in 2016. One former CIA officer in Europe is one of those people.
Sabrina can be reached on Twitter at @Sadiso
